


Events Unnerve Me

by yeats



Category: American Idol RPF
Genre: Canon Queer Character, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-06-11
Updated: 2009-06-11
Packaged: 2017-10-05 20:58:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/45967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeats/pseuds/yeats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some days, Adam forgets it's over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Events Unnerve Me

Some days, Adam forgets it's over.

He'll be driving to lunch, to the dry cleaner's, to the fucking dentist's office, and a vertical wave of panic will hit him all at once, from the top of his spine to the pit of his gut, so bad that he almost has to pull over. He'll check his rearview mirror for sirens, his back pocket for his wallet, his cell phone for missed calls from his parents at some imagined emergency room. His ears ring; his hands shake. He forces his jaw to unclench in stages.

He's halfway down the street, casting glances from both sides of his shades as if there's something stalking him behind the storefronts, and he remembers -- it's done.

He's free.

The first person who phrased it that way was Paula, actually. Somewhere in the snowstorm of press photos and camera angles, no less diminished by the results, Adam heard a call for his name and turned, almost knocked her over. He'd gotten so many hugs by that point, embraces from people he liked and people he didn't, but hers still came as a shock -- her small frame underlaid with muscles, her eyes backlit with tears as she pressed her face against his neck.

"You're free, baby," she said, and her voice sounded spacey like it always did, but that night it made Adam want to cry. "This is the most beautiful thing you've got, and you just gotta -- hold onto it with both hands."

"Thank you," he said into her hair. Over her shoulder, he saw Kris, one of the network handlers, and someone else Adam didn't recognize. He met Adam's gaze, flashed him a quick grin and a thumb's up. Adam squeezed Paula closer, and when he closed his eyes for a second, everything shattered and burst into streaks of light.

Later that night, and in the days that follow (and the ones that follow them), he hears that same word again, from people as disparate as his brother and Rachel Ray, whom he meets at a party and who took a photo with him that's now his iPhone background.

"Well, now you're free to make the kind of music you love!" says the girl who rings up his lunch at M.Cafe.

"At least you're free from all that craziness, man," says the guy from the Mac commercials, across a urinal in Los Feliz.

"Welcome to the land of the free," says Brad, over a sugary cocktail and a sticky bass line. "Go find a famewhore and fuck the Rupert Murdoch out of your system!"

And he could. It's been -- god, Adam doesn't want to think of how long it's been since he last got laid. His birthday, Drake, about an hour before they decided to take things slow, to see what Adam's life looked like on the other side of the freight train hurtling his way. And now? He's still got press, and meetings with men in interchangeable dark suits, and the impending double-feature of recording and tour encroaching from the back of his thoughts, but it's not like it was. He's back in his apartment, his third floor walkup with one room and three windows, and if he wants to make eye contact with someone at the edge of the dance floor and let his night spin out from there, well, he is the most famous fag in America, at least for the next couple of weeks. He can do whatever the fuck he wants.

The guy's name is Cy -- just Cy, a single syllable with a vowel sound that stretches nicely when Adam repeats it. It's a good name, Adam thinks; it suits his smile and the clever way his bangs bar his eyes with shadows. New Order's on the speakers, a little cliche for a place like this, but Adam can work with it. He's buzzed, maybe, or a bit past buzzed, that space where he feels his pulse in his fingers and gets it confused with the music. Cy's rings clack when they hit the studs on Adam's belt, and Adam wishes he could keep that sound, could shove it into his back pocket and throw it into the backing beat on a track. Cy kisses dirty, and tastes a little like mint and menthol, and he doesn't say he knows who Adam is.

Adam goes home alone.

_im thinking about getting a pet. _ He's starfished across his bed, and while his body feels too concrete to get up and change out of his clothes, it's a welcome heaviness, makes him feel present in himself. Gravity, Adam thinks, is way underrated.

His right cheek buzzes, flashes blue and red.

_why not start with a plant_ The clock across the top of his phone says it's almost four, but Adam hopes Kris was already awake. He rolls onto his side, curls in around his phone like a stuffed bear.

_u dont think i could handle a cute fuzzy creature?_

Buzz. _buy a cactus and name it fuzzy._

_i'm gonna get a puppy and name it kris._ Adam stretches his legs, kicks out his feet and rolls his ankles until they both crack. He's never actually had a pet, never dealt with the responsibility of keeping anything but himself alive. Most of the time, that's enough of a challenge. Maybe not anymore. He lets himself pretend his eyes aren't drifting shut as he imagines it. It would change him, he decides, and not just because he'd have something to snuggle up against when he came home with restless hands and a bleary ache in the space between his stomach and his lungs.

_are u asleep?_

Adam grins, copies the text into the reply box. _are u asleep?_

_am i?_

_are u?_ Flashback humor, the call-and-response opener to their whispered confessionals in the mansion when they were too amped to sleep. The same silly shit Adam and Neil used to do when they shared a room on family vacations, spinning out conversation until one or both of them dropped off. Adam wonders if Kris and his brother had nights like that, too.

A long break. Adam tries to narrow his eyes far enough that his room stops being his room, like maybe he can conjure a second bed where his bookshelf stands. It doesn't work.

_did you think it was gonna be like this_

Adam's fingers slip a little on the touchpad. _like what._

An alarm blares past, shrieking down the avenue. In high school, a couple of Adam's friends joined the volunteer EMT crew, and they taught him the difference between the sound of fire trucks, ambulances, and patrol cars. Everything sounds the same in Los Angeles; his breathing expands into the quiet left behind.

_i dont know sometimes i dont remember it happened at all._ A second message, quick on its heels. _sometimes i think it all happened just so i could meet you._

Adam picks up the phone when it rings, the lizard reflexes of his hindbrain seizing on the action as something to do.

"Kris." Adam's teeth stick to the insides of his lips. He curls his tongue, licks his gums.

"Hey." Kris, over the tinny hum of the TV. "Hey, man."

"What are you watching?"

"Nothing." A muffled series of sounds, and the voices stop. "I was just checking the weather."

"Anything newsworthy?" Someone's yelling on the fire escape. Adam rolls over, shielding the phone with his body.

"It hasn't rained for a while."

Adam expects more, but doesn't get it. "Tends to do that, here."

"Like, two and a half months."

"Yeah?"

"Does that seem normal to you?"

"I don't know," Adam says. He wishes he could see Kris' face. "It never really rains here. People sort of lose their shit when it does."

"That's so fucking weird." Adam's maybe heard Kris swear twice before, and it catches him off-guard. "I don't know how you get used to that."

"Are you okay?" Adam pushes himself up on one elbow.

"She wanted to go out," Kris says, vague. "Katy and me -- I guess she didn't really go out much, by herself."

"Where did you go?"

Kris' voice is mumbled, and Adam has to really listen. "We didn't really know where. Just this place near us. Ah, Italian food. Pasta in big dishes, kinda."

"Did you guys have a nice time?" Adam's calf itches. He rubs it with the toe of his other foot, and the itch doesn't go away, but it settles back into something he can ignore. His eye makeup is settling into the corners of his eyes, gritty. If he doesn't get up and take it off now, he knows he'll look atrocious tomorrow. Streaks of black and glitter on his sheets, which he just changed for the first time since he's been back. He looks at the distance between his bed and the door. Scratches his calf again.

"I keep thinking," Kris is saying, "that, like, this is what it's gonna be like, now. I made this huge gamble with my life, our lives, and it came true, and that's what this is. This is how normal's going to feel, from now on, and I have to get used to it."

"It's a big deal," Adam says, slow. He tries to thread the conversation back to where it started. The hour, the dancing, the drinks all hitting him, now. His blood sluicing through his veins, sluggish. "We always said this was gonna be a big deal, either way."

"I know," Kris says, fast, "I know. But I just feel like -- "

Adam holds his breath.

"I can't keep it in my head," he says, almost a whisper. "The whole thing, it won't stick."

"Kris," Adam starts, but he doesn't know how to finish.

"You're the only part that I get."

Adam doesn't make a sound, but it's a close thing. A sharp twist, elegant in the way it guts his insides. He closes his eyes, inhales through his nose, opens his eyes again. His room jumps up before him, and he starts cataloguing things: this is your bookshelf; this is your dresser; this is your unpacked suitcase.

Once, during one of those strange, untethered nights between performance and elimination, Kris asked Adam if he knew what his name meant. "It comes from the Hebrew word for 'man,'" he'd said. All Adam could see were his eyes. "So it's Adam's name specifically, but it's also all our names. And Adam, he's the one that names everything else in the Garden. And what I always loved was... God created the world, but it took Adam -- just some guy, some man -- to say what each thing was, and make sense of it all. Like that's our job, now."

Adam knows that even if they stayed on the phone for days, he'd never make sense of whatever this is, Kris' voice in the night and Adam's heart in his teeth. This is your nightstand. This is your mirror, and this is your bed in its reflection.

"Adam." Kris' voice is raw, like he's wrenching it from somewhere deep. "Adam."

"That's my name," Adam chokes out. "Don't wear it out."

"I need to see you."

Adam rubs his eyes. Fuck the liner; he might as well look as wrecked in the morning as he knows he'll feel. "You see me all the time."

"Now."

"I can't -- I'm drunk," Adam says, which is a lie at this point but feels like it's true, his head cased in fuzz and his balance askew. His stomach roiling. He pulls his knees in, fetal.

"Adam."

"Don't," and Adam's laugh comes out all malformed, crippled. "It's not a good idea."

"I'm sorry," Kris says, low and soft like he means it -- and that's its own special kind of hell, isn't it, because the thing about Kris is that he always means things when he says them.

"It's okay," Adam says. It's okay. Kris is honest, even when he shouldn't be, and Adam isn't, and that's how this works. Kris will tell him the truth, and Adam's half of the bargain is to never ask for it.

"It's not."

"No." Adam pinches the bridge of his nose, pushes his fingertips up under his brow bone. "No, it's kind of not." His sinuses are fucked from all the flying he's done in the last few weeks, as though his body isn't sure whether he's landed yet or whether there's still more distance to travel.

"You're not gonna make this easy for me, are you?" Kris says, at last.

"Is this supposed to be easy." Adam doesn't have the energy to pitch it as a question, and doesn't even try.

"You make it look easy. You make everything look easy."

Adam sits up fast, like he's been slapped. His ears ring, dizzy with a rush of blood. "That's not fair," he hisses. "You -- this isn't about me."

"It is about you," Kris insists, undergirds his words with an edge. "You changed everything."

"This is about you," Adam says, slow enough that he can say it without yelling. "Calling me at four in the morning, and -- "

"You picked up!"

"--and saying shit like that to me, when you know how I..." Adam stops. Runs a hand through his hair, his fingers snarling in the caked product. "You can't keep making me that guy."

"What guy?"

Adam fists his bangs, tugging sharply. Say it, faggot, he thinks. Fucking say it.

"The guy who says no at four in the morning when you call him and want him to come over," he says. "The guy who gets you off the hook."

"Who says," and there's nothing in Kris' tone that Adam can latch onto, "I want to be let off the hook."

Adam pulls his legs in against his chest and hugs his shins, phone tucked in the crevice between his neck and shoulder. "You don't know what you want."

"I do."

"What, then?" Adam says, unable to stop himself, "what the fuck do you want, Kris?" and Adam knows what Kris is going to say, just like he knew what Ryan was going to say that night on stage, just like he knows that no matter what anyone tells him, there's no getting free now, if there ever had been.

"You," Kris says, thick.

Again, as if Adam can't hear him. "You."

"Want me for what."

"What?"

"What --" Adam forces his words back down his throat, feels them rattle and expand in his lungs, knocking against his ribs, "do you want me for?"

"Come on." Skittish, bewildered. "You know."

"I don't," Adam says, "I don't know what you want from me, Kris. Do you want me to fuck you?" He pushes past the sharp, startled noise Kris makes. "Do you want me to drive over to the house you live in with your _wife_ and fuck you in the tv den?"

If he tries, Adam can picture Kris at this instant, with an almost over-exact sense of detail. Sitting in the den of the place he and Katy rent in Studio City, tucked in the corner of that horrible red couch Katy bought on layaway in college, her sorority blanket wrapped across his shoulders. Even on the hottest days, Kris complained about the air conditioning in the mansion, layered t-shirts and button-down plaids when he thought he could get away without Adam teasing him. "This place is downright drafty," he said, tucking his feet under Adam's thighs as they sat watching game shows on mute. "It's like living in a really fancy freezer box." Adam squeezed Kris' toe between his thumb and forefinger, wriggled it and called him their little countrymouse, all whiskery and adorable and wee, and Kris heeled him in the balls, and by the time Allison found them for dinner, Adam could barely breathe for laughter and Kris' weight tackled over his own.

Adam's thoughts wander, unraveling in worse and worse configurations. He's tired, he realizes, of everything: Kris, himself, this hideous silence that's stretching itself out between them like a third party on the line. His whole body sinks in on itself, cratering down to the pit where his stomach used to be. He's been so tired for so long, worn down in so many places by nights like these and moments like this that everything feels skinned raw.

"Say something," he says.

Adam can hear Kris swallow. "What do you want me to say?"

"I don't care." The inside of his mouth bears imprints of his clenched teeth, coppery patches he can taste. "Tell me how that's not what this is about."

"Adam," a little desperate.

"Tell me," Adam says, "you'll have me sleep in your bed when mine's covered in clothes, and you'll talk on national television about how much you love me, and you'll call me and say that I'm the only thing in your life that makes any sense anymore, and _I'm_ the one who just crossed the line."

"No," Kris says, stumbling over himself, "No, it's just -- it's all fucked up."

"Then tell me I'm wrong."

The air conditioning kicks on -- just the fan at first. The hairs at the back of Adam's neck prick, beaded sweat cooling against his skin. He can't remember whether he set it to a timer, or if it just turns itself on at a certain temperature.

"Adam, come on. I'm married," Kris says, helpless.

Adam's laugh still sounds nothing like a laugh. "No shit."

"You already know I." He trails off, with a little sigh like the words he's found don't fit. "You know what this is, with us."

"So tell me."

When Kris answers, his voice has shifted. "I tried to find the beach, tonight." Darkened, maybe, deepened. His nighttime voice, Adam thinks despite himself, quiet like the one he used in the dark in their bedroom at the mansion, the two of them alone in the basement of that great house, heads tilted towards one another and weak light from the hallway slipping under the door.

"What?"

"That beach we went to, right after Alexis left," he coaxes. "You remember."

"Yeah." Adam goes quiet, too, all the fight knocked out of him. His chest feels hollow in its absence.

"Katy came to pick me up in that horrible car she rented, the convertible she got on a whim when she thought we'd be going home in a week and a half. You didn't want to come, but I made you. I wanted you there. I don't even remember where we were gonna go -- maybe we didn't even know, we just wanted out of the house. You had your legs spread over the back seat, and your head tipped back, like a golden retriever or something, just lapping it all up. I remember," he says, "I remember glancing back in the rearview mirror, and you looked over and. And I felt it."

"Kris," Adam starts, but Kris cuts him off, "No, it's -- let me finish, okay? You said you wanted me to tell you, so I'll tell you, just let me."

Adam sits up again, leans back against the headboard of his bed. Watches the digital clock on his cable box slide a minute forward. 4:35 am. Nothing feels real, so it takes no effort for him to lick his lips, say, "Okay."

"When you found out Katy'd never been to the beach since she got here, you just sat up and said, turn around, like we'd already planned it. Like you'd known all along how it was gonna turn out, what was gonna happen.

"You took us to this place, you said it was your secret spot, in the middle of Malibu with all these crazy houses with gates and guards, and I was scared shitless we were gonna get arrested, kicked off the show for trespassing. But you led us around, down this little path through the brush, and it was." He lets out a breath. "Unbelievable. I didn't even know places like that existed in L.A., or anywhere else anymore. There wasn't anybody there except us, and maybe that's just because it was sort of cloudy, I don't know, but it -- literally, it felt like we were at the end of the world."

Reaching out, Adam grabs his cigarettes from the nightstand. He hasn't smoked since his birthday, one last celebratory vice with his gang before Idol. He can't imagine how old these are, taps one out onto his palm and stares at it.

The contours of a solid object dig against his ass; when he slides his fingers into his back pocket, he pulls out a book of matches from the club. Holds it with the cigarette, cupped together in his hand. Considers lighting up. He can almost taste the smoke at the back of his throat, rich and full. Funny -- he never smoked more than a pack every other week, maybe even less, but the need, the memory of having it and the dull ache of not, doesn't really go away.

"Katy stripped down to her underwear first," Kris says, with a small muffled sound Adam recognizes as a chuckle. "I guess she figured you were too polite to suggest it, and I was too much of a prude to even think about doing it. The water was so fucking cold, I thought my balls were gonna freeze rock-solid."

"Pussy," Adam snorts. "I told you no one goes swimming in March." He tosses the matches onto the nightstand. Passes the cigarette from knuckle to knuckle, dancing it across his fingers and then back.

"Yeah, but you came in with us," Kris says, "even though you knew better. You just went for it, dragging us with you, and if it could've been weird you didn't let it, because that's how you are. I think we probably only lasted maybe fifteen minutes before we jumped out, but it was the best time I'd had all year."

The corner of the rolling paper is coming loose. Adam picks at it with his thumb.

"You were going to kiss me."

Adam unwinds the paper some more. A few dried specks of tobacco fall onto his bed. "When."

"You know when," Kris says. "Katy fell asleep on the sand, and we climbed those rocks at the edge of the beach, and just sat, talking about the ocean, what it meant for you to grow up near one.

"Our knees were brushing, and the hairs on your thighs were standing up, over your freckles. I remember looking at your knees, at your hands, your forearms, and I'd never realized how all the pieces of you fit together before -- like, I don't know if you know this, but with your clothes on and everything, you're pretty overwhelming. You're this whole intense package, which is great, you know I think it's great. But this was the first time I really looked at the other parts of you up close, like the connections between all the craziness, the side you maybe don't trust so much to show everybody else, so you hide it under your clothes. And I could tell I was staring, but I couldn't make myself stop. I couldn't get over it. How real you were. How honest it felt, to be sitting with you like that.

"You looked at me." Kris wets his lips. "And I thought, this is it. This is when it's going to happen."

Adam hasn't missed a cue since the dress rehearsal of "Our Town" in ninth grade, but tonight he's slow on the uptake, or maybe just improv-ing, so he rides out the moment, breathes through it. He tries to align his memories of that day to match Kris', tapping the cigarette against the crest of his bent knee. Strange, all the places where they didn't overlap: Katy and Kris' original plans to go to Disneyland; Kris' grin as he showed Adam how to open a beer bottle with the heel of his sneaker; the hermit crab they found at the top of the beach and ferried to the waterline, Katy making motherly sounds as they placed it gently next to a bit of driftwood. Kris' hand, spackled with drying sea-salt and gritty sand in the nailbeds, running up and down his own bicep as they sat, and talked, and watched the tide.

"Nothing happened," Adam says, steadily.

"You were thinking it, too." Which isn't an argument, not exactly. But not the same thing, either, and Adam can tell they both know it.

"No, I -- " Adam scratches the back of his neck. "I don't know."

"You did. I could see it in your face. You were picking at your nailpolish -- that's what you do when you get nervous."

Adam glances down at his fingers, sees that he's stripped them almost bare. "Sometimes when I swim," he says, slow, "they get chipped."

"Bullshit." The cigarette snaps between the knuckles of Adam's first and second finger, spilling tobacco flakes over his sheets, his jeans. "You think I can't read you? Even then, you think I couldn't tell?"

"I told you, it's just you're kind of my type." Adam sits up, batting at the ash-like dusting that covers his jeans.

"You told Rolling Stone I was your type," Kris says, affectionate and annoyed at the same time. "That's not what I'm talking about. I could tell you," and Adam can hear Kris' blush, "you wanted me. Right then."

Adam herds the tobacco into a pile at the center of his bed. The smell reminds him of Berlin, somehow. He dips his littlest finger in it, draws a swirling pattern with his nail. "I thought you were going to tell me what you wanted, not me."

"I'm trying to," and there's something undeniably Southern about the delivery of his vowels. "Jesus Christ, Adam, how many different ways does a guy have to say that he was too scared to kiss you?"

"That." Adam dashes out the pattern with the blunt edge of his palm. "That way works," he croaks.

"You can be such an ass, I swear," Kris huffs, and something like a laugh bubbles up from Adam's chest cavity, hysteric and closer to a sob.

"It was a bad idea." Adam's too tired to say anything but the truth.

"Probably."

He rubs his eyes, feels a fleck of tobacco affix itself to his skin. "Like, a terrible idea."

"I'm not saying it wasn't."

"Like," Adam pushes the whole pile of flakes onto the floor, the broken cigarette halves with it, "we're talking Don Henley-levels, here."

"Such an ass," Kris repeats, and there's a smile there, Adam knows it. It's five in the morning, and neither of them's slept more than seven hours in the last seven weeks, and they're talking to each other, instead. "When we didn't, I was glad. I thought, yeah, okay, that was -- well, whatever it was, but it wasn't anything, really, and so I didn't have to worry about keeping my head in the game."

"And look how that turned out." Adam's just smoothing his sheet by now, sliding his hand back and forth over the fabric.

"Yeah, I know." There's a rustling -- Adam can't tell if Kris is standing or lying down, but when he speaks again, his voice is louder, as if he's gotten closer to the phone. "But now, it's like. All that happened. And it was great, it still is. But people keep asking me what it's like being in the free world again, and I think of that day, the beach. And I feel like I'm still there."

Adam splays his fingers out. "Nothing's changed, since then."

"I know that -- that's the point," Kris presses. "We got chased off the beach by the rain, and Katy yelled at us for not turning down the convertible top, and by the time we got back to the house you'd fallen asleep and she wasn't talking to me. And I never got -- "

"Closure?" Adam hazards.

"This isn't Tyra, Adam." They both laugh, a little, and Adam knows this is an out, a space for them to crawl out of this tunnel and back to safe ground -- Adam's television habits, Kris' crush on Katie Couric, their shared addiction to "Project Runway" and on and on, a hundred thousand topics that don't end here.

Still, he's not surprised by the hitch, harsh and desperate, in Kris' voice. "I just feel like I'm going out of my skin sometimes thinking about you, and I can't -- I don't know what to do."

"I don't have any answers," Adam says. "I'm sorry."

Kris gives another tight little laugh. "Of all the times you'd pick to stop sticking your nose in -- "

"I know." Adam can see the first fingertips of sunlight threatening the lip of his windowsill. He leans forward, snags the curtain pull and tugs the shades down further. Sits back on his heels, cradling the phone. "I wish I could."

"Just. Tell me I'm not crazy," and Adam wishes, fiercer than anything else he's felt all night, that they were back in their room, back in the fucking madness of everything, just so he could reach out and touch Kris' hand in the dark, and squeeze.

"Oh, honey," he murmurs. "Not even a little."

Adam watches the rebuffed light seep through his dark curtains, and realizes can't remember the exact moment everything started. He's got no idea when his insides first shifted in accordance with Kris' presence. The feeling itself reminds him of his father holding a magnet and a pocket compass at arm's length so Adam could watch North wobble, uncentered. Adam's been reorienting himself to account for the slight warp of Kris' pull for long enough now that it's gotten natural. He thinks about his tattoo, about Kris' face the first time Adam let him touch it. "It doesn't feel any different," Kris had said, dragging his first two fingers across the thin skin. "It feels like it's always been there. Like it started inside and bled out, almost."

"It's late," he says, as gentle as he can.

"I know." Kris sounds half-asleep, wrung out. "I should -- "

"Go lie down."

"Yeah." Kris stands. Adam hears the shush of blankets falling away, the little sigh Kris makes when he stretches his arms to the far limits of their reach. "Adam?"

"Mm?"

"You're my still best friend, okay?"

Adam bites his bottom lip, and lets it hurt.

"Yeah," he whispers. "Okay. Night." His thumb hovers over the "end call" button long after the line goes dead.

Adam's entire body feels ginger, overused -- almost like he's been fucked, he thinks, and that's enough for a smile. Still got your sense of humor, kid.

He settles himself back down on his bed limb by limb, arranging himself in a precise configuration under his sheets. His skin crackles with tobacco bits, and his eyes hurt when he closes them, the muscles of his eyelids sore. He clasps his hands together against his chest, intertwines his fingers.

Tomorrow, he thinks, he'll vacuum. He'll take out his trash, change his sheets and stay in the bath long enough that every kink in his shoulders unfolds. He'll go to the farmer's market and get himself dinner, something he can eat with his hands. He'll donate twenty bucks from his pocket to ASPCA, and go home with a potted plant -- African violets, like Allison's mom had in her bedroom in the mansion. And when he gets home, he'll put them on the windowsill over his desk, where they'll get the best light in the afternoon. He won't give them a name, but he'll water them, and he'll talk to them, and when he lies down, he'll be able to see them and know that they're okay.


End file.
